hung up and thought about how much he didn’t want to go to Tel Aviv. On the other hand, it would get him out of the office. And it was his job.
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv’s sunlit concrete was a nightmare environment for spotting surveillance. Alan Craik was looking for surveillance because he was gun-shy from the events of yesterday, and because that’s what he had been taught to do in a hostile environment. And this was now a hostile environment.
He was on his adversary’s home ground, a colossal disadvantage. And the city’s modernity eliminated narrow streets with blind corners and back alleys in favor of broad boulevards. Heavy buildings set a bomb-blast’s reach away from the street gave potential watchers plenty of room on the wide sidewalks, among the hundreds of vendors and the thousands of pedestrians, to stalk him at will.
If his opponents had all these advantages and deployed a large, diverse team to watch him, he would never see them. If they were lazy, undermanned, or too uniform—that was another story. Especially if he could lead them into an environment where they were out of place, ill-dressed, just wrong. That was his technique, perfected in the souks and western hotels of the Gulf States. He planned his routes to cross the invisible social boundaries that define class and trade, profession, education. His route today went from his hotel to the diamond district, through the towers and business suits of the insurance brokerage houses, in and out of the library and the museum of the University, and on to his meeting.
He made his first watcher ten minutes into the walk. He spotted her early, a slight young woman in a drab scarf with a face like Julie Andrews. He gave her that name in his head, an automatic catalogue of everyone who gave him a glance or appeared interested in his progress. Her rugby shirt, jean shorts, and tanned legs were unremarkable on the busy sidewalk three blocks from his hotel.
What could be more natural than the American officer cruising the diamond district for his wife? But Julie Andrews drew stares from the conservative, Orthodox men on the sidewalk. She stood out like Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Alan felt his heart swelling in his chest, the first sweet rush of adrenaline hitting him. His snatch, the terror of it, the humiliation retreated with this little victory.
He’d never spotted a real surveillant before. And these were Israelis, probably Mossad. On their home ground.
Take that, you bastards.
Alan showed them how boring he was, how unconcerned he was that he’d been their prisoner sixteen hours earlier. He had to fight the temptation to show them that he had spotted them. He wished he had a camera—maybe Mike would care? The embassy? He’d have to file a report, anyway. Embassies took this kind of thing seriously.
Leaving the huge concrete octagon of the university library, he scored another victory. He’d spotted the possibilities of the library on his first trip to Israel. Doors everywhere, and one small, but legitimate, exit to a garden whose real purpose was to illuminate the chancellor’s plate glass window. The garden had a narrow walkway that led out past the graduate residence and directly downhill to a protected bus stop.
When he arrived at the bus stop, he had the intense satisfaction of watching Miss Andrews run down a ramp behind him, talking into the collar of her shirt, stopping to talk to a youngish man he hadn’t spotted, and then, to be treasured and retold forever like a find in a yard sale, he got to watch a third person, a stocky middle-aged male in a T-shirt, climb into a waiting van with a heavy aerial and speed away through the bus lane, the paunchy occupant staring at Alan openmouthed through the passenger window from four feet away.
Alan got the license number. It didn’t matter a damn, it shouldn’t have done anything to balance the indignity of yesterday, but his mood was lighter. His shoulders were squarer, and he found that he was whistling when he approached the meeting. His watch said he’d enter the lobby on time to the minute.
The man in the hotel lobby wasn’t anyone’s idea of a military intelligence officer. He was short, heavy to the point of fat, dressed in a khaki bush jacket, faded jeans and sandals that had been worn to paint something orange. His head was bald and almost perfectly round. His hands were huge, which, combined with his round head and his dark glasses, gave him the look of a garden mole.
Alan had expected an officer in uniform. Or perhaps a slender, sunburned man in shorts. He expected the Shin Bet to be different from the Mossad—but not this different.
The man’s smile was warm and penetrating, too warm to be feigned. “Commander Craik?” he said. “Benjamin Aaronson. Call me Ben.” Alan’s hand vanished in one of his, and then they were in an elevator headed up, their recognitions exchanged.
“Your wife like Tel Aviv? Ugly city, but great shopping.” Ben held the door to a room—no, a suite of rooms. There was a laptop on a table big enough to seat a board of directors. He closed the door behind them, set the bolt. “You got fucked over by Mossad yesterday.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.” Alan tossed his backpack on the table. He was surprised by the wave of anger that accompanied the admission, as if having to confess that he’d been snatched put him at a disadvantage. A rare insight—Alan could suddenly see that it was a macho thing, like getting mugged. His masculinity—to hell with that.
“Well, we’re sorry. We’re really sorry, and you beat the odds by showing today—half the guys in my unit said you’d walk. Wouldn’t blame you.”
Alan swallowed a couple of comments, all unprofessional. “Not something I’d really like to talk about,” he said.
“Sure.” Ben opened the laptop. “You have some files for me.”
Alan opened his backpack, removed a data storage device and put it on the table, tore off a yellow sticky from a pad on the table and wrote a string of numbers from memory. “Files are on the stick. There’s the crypto key.” He shrugged. “I don’t really know what’s on it.”
Ben plugged it into his laptop, replaced his black sunglasses with bifocals, and peered at the screen, hunting keys with exaggerated care as he typed the digits. “You want some food? There’s enough in there to feed my whole unit.”
“You the commander?” Alan asked. He was looking out the window, wondering if he should have ditched the meeting.
“Um-hmm.” Ben was scrolling now, looking very fast at the documents Alan had provided. “I’m the colonel—you think they’re going to send some stooge to meet you?” He smiled over the screen. “Relax, Commander. This is going to take some time.”
“You have stuff for me, too, I hope.”
“That’s what ‘exchange’ means.” His attention went back to the screen.
Maybe it was the residue of yesterday, but Alan had expected something more adversarial, something like bargaining in the souk. He already thought he’d been put at a disadvantage by coughing up his stuff first, but it didn’t feel like that. Ben felt more like an aviator than a spy.
“You always been an intel guy?” Alan asked.
“No. No, I started in a tank. I was a crew commander in Lebanon in ‘83.” He continued to scroll while he talked.
Alan nodded to show that he knew what had happened in Lebanon in 1983.
“Everyone goes into the military here—that
